


Domestic Rites II

by acaelousqueadcentrum



Series: Domestic Rites [2]
Category: Rookie Blue
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:42:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4083604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaelousqueadcentrum/pseuds/acaelousqueadcentrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>8 small stories of a life together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domestic Rites II

**1\. What habits does each have that the other hates?**

Holly is a problem solver. She can’t help it. She just is. So whenever Gail has a bad day and comes home wanting to complain or bitch or just air out her bad mood, Holly tries to offer a solution. Tries to help Gail see it from the other side. Tries to play the devil’s advocate. And Gail hates it. Truly. It’s the one thing Holly does that really, really gets under Gail’s skin.  
But she doesn’t say anything. Not at first. She doesn’t know how.

It’s no secret that Gail thinks she’s not good enough for Holly, and their incident at the bar did nothing to help her past that. But it’s not her job or her background, not really. Those aren’t the things that make her worry that one day Holly will wake up and realize she’s made a terrible mistake. It’s the same thing that made her try to be someone other than herself when they first got together, up until the pep talk from Oliver anyway.

She’s moody and irrational and carries so much baggage around with her that her issues have issues. She’s not good. She knows this.

And Holly deserves someone good.

But with time, and honestly, with a little therapy for both of them, Holly learns to listen. To just listen. To listen and to not reach for what seems to natural for her, offering a way to help. And Gail tries too. Sometimes when Holly forgets, Gail lets her. Sometimes Gail listens too.

As far as habits Gail has that Holly hates, the biggest one is that when things get to be too much, when the voices of doubt slip back in past all of the good walls they’ve built together, Gail closes up. Puts a little distance between them. Like she’s afraid of what she’ll do or say.

Holly’s not. Afraid, that is. Not like Gail is. But as much as she tries to point out the self-fulfilling prophecy that is Gail’s coping mechanism, the other woman continues to step back. And it takes a lot of patience, a lot of work, and a whole lot of love to get them back to where they were. That, too, is where the therapy helps. Because she loves Gail. Loves her more than anyone. And nothing Gail does could ever change that, could ever make her feel any differently. Nothing could ever make her choose to walk away from this woman, this beautiful, amazing, wonderful woman.

She’s just afraid that someday, Gail will take away her choice, make the decision for her.

That, she hates.

 

**2\. What arbitrary rules do they enforce on each other? (direction the toilet paper, color of hand soap, how to set the table, etc.).**

Gail grew up under Elaine’s controlling thumb, so she’s really pretty adverse to rules she finds arbitrary. Still, though, whether she realizes it or not, she has a few. Like the milk must absolutely not be kept in the refrigerator door. And though she’s never stated it explicitly, every time Holly forgot and put it in the door, it’d somehow been moved to the main shelf by the next time she looked in there. Or the way all laundry must be folded as it’s being removed from the dryer, and not left in a basket to be folded and put away later as Holly is sometimes accustomed to doing.

“It just makes sense,” Gail insists, “otherwise everything gets wrinkled.”

“That only works if you then put it away, Gail,” Holly argues back, and pulls out a folded but terribly wrinkled pair of pants from the bottom of the laundry basket that Gail’s left sitting next to their dresser for almost a week, “if you just leave it in the basket and grab as you go, everything ends up wrinkled anyway.”

They agree to disagree, for the most part.

But Holly, too, has her little quirks. She actually is a stickler about the toilet paper; to the point of pulling up an image of the original patent application online, where the roll is clearly indicated as going with the paper over, not under. Gail, of course, gets a joyful kick out of ignoring the doctor completely, and puts the new roll on upside down every time. And it’s Holly who’s in charge of organizing their pantry, because when Gail does it the rice ends up on the bottom shelf with the potatoes and the bag of flour sits right up front even though they rarely need to refill the canister. Holly knows what they use most often, and what needs to be within easy reach, so Holly’s the one who does it.

Things just work better that way.

 

**3\. What slight from years ago do they bring up against each other in fights when it starts getting ugly?**

Years after the fact, Gail still brings up Holly’s friends, the incident at the bar. How Holly didn’t fight for her, how Holly let her walk away and let her stay away for so long. She’d needed Holly to fight for her, to fight with her. Needed to know that Holly thought they had something worth saving, worth rebuilding. Because she certainly had.

But Holly hadn’t. Holly let her leave. Holly didn’t fight for her. And in Gail’s mind at the time, it was because she wasn’t worth fighting for.

It wasn’t the truth, not by a long shot. They’d just been so new to each other, to the depth of their feelings. And so Holly hadn’t known that Gail needed her to chase, just as Gail hadn’t known that Holly needed her to stay.

There are other slights between them. Stupid things that both of them have done over the years. But this is the one that will never go away. No matter how much they’ve talked about it. No matter how many apologies they’ve issued. No matter how much they’ve grown to understand about each other.

It will always be the one shadow in their shared past.

Because Holly’s biggest fear is the people she loves will leave her.

And Gail’s is that the people she loves will let her go.

 

**4\. In what ways do they let themselves go?**

It’s not so much letting herself go, but pretty early in their relationship Gail realizes that Holly doesn’t care if she shaves her legs that morning, or how she styles her bush, or any of that sort of thing. So her old habits, the things Gail thought she had to do because that’s the lesson she’d gotten from her mother, her boyfriends, the whole damn world, go out the window. If she feels like shaving, she does. If she doesn't, she doesn't. It's amazing, actually. Holly loves her when she wears makeup and when she doesn’t, with body hair and without, smelling like she’s just come home from the gym and smelling like she’s just stepped out of a bath scented with rose oil. Holly just loves her. Nothing else matters.

Then, right around their first anniversary, Holly cancels her gym membership. Rachel and Lisa tease her about letting herself go now that she was in a real, grown-up relationship. She rolls her eyes at them, of course, because they know as well as she does that her gym membership has never been about her weight or staying in shape. Not really. She's just saying goodbye to old patterns of bad behavior. The gym had always been her first stop after a break-up. In part to burn off whatever bad energy she was feeling, but also because, to be completely honest, it was easy to pick up someone new, easy to jump into something with someone else and not have to deal with the fallout of her emotions. So canceling her membership is symbolic, a cutting of ties with the Holly of old. It's a statement. She's serious about Gail and their relationship. She wants the future that Gail is offering, and this is just one of the many changes she's making in her life to make that plain. Plus, it’s not like she's quit exercising completely. Sex with Gail is always pretty energetic; they work up quite a good sweat with each other. And if she feels the need for more, she can just drag her girlfriend out for an early-morning run.

 

**5\. How do their parenting styles conflict? If they don’t have children, do they argue about that? If neither wants children, how do their pet training styles conflict?**

It’s not that their parenting styles conflict. It’s that Gail constantly worries that she’s not good enough, and it hurts Holly deeply to watch her partner struggle. Gail wants kids from the start. Even before they broke up, Holly was aware of how much the police officer wanted children, a family. Maybe even more than Gail herself was. Because the one time she brought it up before that night at the Penny, just out of the blue, Gail had scrunched her nose and repeated the words that Traci’d said to her a few years before, about pitying any kid who’d have her as a mother. But Holly saw through the bravado and even past the doubt to the hurt underneath. Gail wanted to be a mother. Badly. It was part of her, buried deep inside her heart.

When they begin the process of fighting for Sophie–just a few short weeks after making the decision to get back together, to stay in Toronto, to start again–she and Holly have long talks about what kind of parents they want to be. And Holly begins the long process of helping Gail to see that she is good enough. And slowly, Gail begins to believe it.

So it’s not that they’re parenting styles conflict. They’re partners. They create their style together. Parenting, Holly reminds Gail when she forgets, when she frets and worries and second-guesses herself, is love. It’s a whole bunch of other things too, and they both know it, but at it’s base, at it’s beginning, it’s about love. They’ll make mistakes, Holly reminds Gail, it’s inevitable, but they’ll also do plenty of things right. All that matters is that they love their kids unconditionally, and that their kids know it.  
In the end, they’re pretty damn good at the parenting thing.

 

**6\. What do they do that embarrasses each other (preferably in public)?**

Holly babbles. She’ll go on and on about a subject–no matter what it is–for hours unless someone stops her. More than once Gail has taken pity on an unsuspecting stranger who made the mistake of asking the doctor what she’s working on lately. She’ll let Holly ramble on just long enough for the other person’s eyes to glaze over and they start looking around for someone, anyone, to call out their name. But eventually she’ll step in and distract Holly with a refilled drink or a subtle grasp of the ass. Or sometimes even a kiss.

As for Holly, it’s not so much embarrassing when Gail goes all cop in public. Not for her, anyway. It’s just that it makes her really, really, hot. So when they’re out for a drink and Gail sees some sleaze who just won’t leave a girl alone, she’ll go up to him in that way she has, swinging her hips, swaggering. Sex poured into skin-tight jeans and a leather jacket. And Holly will just watch while Gail takes him down. Inch by inch, point by point, until the guy crawls away with his tail between his legs. Hopefully, he’ll think better about pestering women who clearly aren’t interested, but before he’s even out of sight Holly’s already forgotten he ever existed. She’s too busy calculating the odds that their friends will catch them having sex in the bathroom again.

**7\. What do they do that makes the other jealous?**

Jealousy has no place in their relationship. They’re adults, they’re secure in their relationship and in themselves.

It actually kind of drives some of their friends batty. Dov, for instance, who goes bananas if Chloe mentions her ex-husband. And Andy, who’s always scrutinizing every interaction Sam has with the opposite sex. They have no idea how Gail can watch Holly watch a good looking woman order a drink at the bar and just exchange a knowing glance, how Gail doesn’t wonder if Holly has cheated, would cheat, will cheat.

But Gail and Holly understand. They know that what they have is strong. That what they have is real. That what they have is forever. They understand that looking doesn’t mean wanting and that wanting doesn’t mean doing.

They’ve made their choices. They’ve chosen each other. And, after all, there’s no harm in appreciating all of the beautiful things the world has to offer. And doing it together.

 

**8\. When was the last time they almost broke up? What was it over?**

They have a bad year once.

They’ve gone through rough spots before. But this one, this almost ends them.

It starts with Gail being put undercover on a supposedly simple drug op.

It turns into a year of being hunted. Of having bodyguards accompany their daughter to and from school, of having a police officer assigned to follow Holly around at the morgue and on the rare occasion when her specific presence was required in the field. Of having a marked squad sitting outside their house every night, and another one, unmarked, further up the block.

It ends with Gail running away. Or almost, anyway. Thinking about it. Trying.

As far as the blonde is concerned, she’d done the unthinkable. She’d put her family in danger. She’d been the reason that their daughter suddenly had trouble sleeping again, that Sophie had night terrors about two more mothers dying and leaving her behind.  
So she decides to leave. Because she won’t listen to Holly try to tell her that it’s not her fault. She won’t listen to her brother or her fellow cops or even her therapist. She’s gotten it in her head that it’s her fault and no one can get her to think otherwise.  
Until Holly asks Elaine for help.

And in the end, it’s Elaine who saves their marriage, who pulls Gail back from the dark and lonely path she’s started down.

Elaine tells her daughter about something that happened right around the time Gail was born. How her father pissed off a gun runner for a local mid-level mob, and how after a pipe bomb exploded in their mailbox one morning, they’d had to pack up 4-year-old Steve and be driven over into New York to live for a few months under a different name while the division took down the Rico Papadosio and his cronies.

“So that’s why I have dual citizenship,” Gail asks, not entirely believing the story. After all, no one’s ever told her about it before. “You always said that I came early on a trip to the States.”

Elaine nods. “You did come early. We were under a lot of stress, and the doctor said that was probably the reason why. But we were in New York to protect you and Steve, because the threats were getting more serious every day.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” Gail asks, “Does Steve know?”

“Your father was always ashamed that we ran, that he didn’t stay to help with the investigation. So we never spoke of it. If Steve does remember anything from that time, he’s never said.”

Gail sits for a few moments, quiet, before she looks around the room at her family. Her wife and daughter. Her mother.

“I get it. I do,” she says, and there’s a look of something that might be shame. Until Holly kisses it away, at least.

“We’re here,” the brunette says, “and we’re okay. We survived. Because we were together, Gail. We survived because we were together.”

Gail squeezes her hand tighter, and lets herself cry. Lets herself let go of the past year and all of its terrible burdens.

The future ahead is full of unknowns.

But she knows they’ll make it.

They’ve all got each other.


End file.
